* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Some of the most innovative thinking in the world happens within universities… and never leaves. We need to these ideas out into the real world.
Some of the most innovative thinking in the world happens within universities… and never leaves.
Meanwhile, outside the Ivory Tower walls, the world’s greatest challenges – poverty, access to health care, climate change – still need solving. We need to break the Tower walls to get these brilliant ideas out and into the real world. Seven universities are working together to change that.
These seven schools in the Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) – a partnership led by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s U.S. Global Development Lab – channel the ingenuity of university students, researchers, and faculty toward solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Instead of just learning in the abstract, students are working with community leaders, industry experts and private sector partners to deploy their ideas in more than 50 countries that need it most. These students aren’t just learning within the walls of a classroom, they are part of a far larger structure that allows them to partner, leverage, and cooperate across time zones, borders and cultures so that innovative ideas can flow freely between them.
At the University of California, Berkeley, for instance, an undergraduate class figured out a way to convert a cell phone into a microscope. Their “CellScope” smartphone technology has the potential to help health care workers in remote areas diagnose diseases like TB, malaria, and even some forms of cancer, without their patients traveling miles to the nearest clinic.
Instead of being relegated to the tables of a science fair, the CellScope team has now grown beyond its initial student group to include faculty, researchers and outside partners including ministries of health of foreign countries. Together, the CellScope partners are working to pilot the tool with community health workers for thousands of patients in places like Cameroon, Vietnam, and Thailand and are exploring manufacturing partnerships to help scale the device to thousands more.
Meanwhile on the other side of the country, Duke University students inserted a powerful cocktail of antiretroviral drugs into something that looks like a ketchup packet. Their life-saving invention can last for up to 12 months without refrigeration—an astonishing breakthrough that extends the shelf life of antiretroviral medication for HIV-infected infants in developing countries with little access to healthcare.
After eight years of painstaking prototyping, partnership building, and hypothesis testing, the breakthrough “Pratt Pouch” is now in clinical trials with the support of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which is working to scale the pouch to reach more than 400,000 newborns in Uganda. Its impact could be enormous.
Breakthroughs like these are not limited to U.S. institutions. In Uganda, Makerere University leads a group of more than 20 universities in 16 countries, collectively called the Resilient Africa Network (RAN). The network’s Youth Spark Innovation Grants are igniting a movement within the so-called “Cheetah Generation” of young, forward-thinking African students. These young people understand their communities and the creative solutions that will make a difference like no one else coming in from the outside.
This April, RAN student Grace Nakibaala and her team competed at the Berkeley Big Ideas competition. They designed an ingeniously simple tool called the PedalTap – an alternative to faucet sensors that protect people from contracting infectious diseases at a fraction of the cost. Since most health facilities in developing countries can’t afford these sensors, the PedalTap prototype has the potential to prevent needless illness and keep communities healthy in poor areas all over the world.
These are just a few of the more than 200 innovations HESN Labs have helped develop. And with each of these innovations, it’s clear that brilliant ideas alone don’t ensure success. It takes an army of connected people to move ideas from classrooms and laboratories to the real world. Whether it’s the support of communities, development professionals, universities, manufacturing companies, governments, or international NGOs, each of the HESN universities brings together partners – all with different expertise and skill sets – to turn ideas into realities.
To that end, we are asking university development labs to help break down this Ivory Tower and join the partnership movement to tackle our greatest development challenges. We’re asking students to dream big by fervently believing that their ideas can make this world a better place. We’re asking investors to support these sharp, young minds with the funding to bring their innovations to market. And we’re asking entrepreneurs, innovators and community leaders around the world to work with us to bridge the gap. Because when universities truly leverage their power to be hubs not just of learning but of doing, there are no limits to how we will change the world.
This fall, we’ll host our third TechCon gathering at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts to highlight cutting-edge solutions and spark the collective imagination of hundreds of students, professors, out-of-the-box thinkers, and investors. All creative minds are welcome.
Ticora V. Jones, PhD, is Chief of the Higher Education Solutions Network within USAID's U.S. Global Development Lab. The network’s participating universities include the College of William & Mary, The University of California - Berkeley, Duke University, Makerere University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, and Texas A&M University.
